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Conviviability: the role of civil society in culture and development
Lourdes Arizpe.
Development processes in the last few decades have shown very uneven results. While East Asia has had great success in economic growth with social stability, although with recent crises, other regions have fared less well, with some countries getting ahead while others lag behind. There is consensus now that economic growth is not enough to improve the human condition; other factors are crucial for human development and must now be targeted in development policies. These include democratic governance, civil society organization, poverty eradication and culture in development. Working with civil society, in fact, touches on all of these aspects at the same time. Yet we lack an analytical concept that would allow us to understand all of these factors together.
In this paper I would like to propose that we work towards evolving a more encompassing view of these factors. We need a concept to refer to the redefining of the relationships between different human groups in nation-states in the context of globality. This concept should also provide the goal for working together towards a sustainable development in the 21st century. While better terms could perhaps be suggested, I would like to put forward that of conviviability or, as we say in Spanish, convivencia, for such a purpose.
Many studies have profusely shown that sustainability, that is, fulfilling human needs while preserving and protecting the natural environment for future generations, cannot be achieved without human cooperation and peace. In many places, even when people are aware and willing to protect the natural environment, they may find it impossible to do so because of economic, political or social pressures. Eliminating these pressures requires, in turn, solving problems of dire poverty, income inequalities, political persecution and conflict, social exclusion, and cultural repression, all of them related to the way in which different human groups live together. Thus, I contend that sustainability cannot be achieved without conviviability.
There is also need of such a concept given the transformation of nation-states as a consequence of globality. Changes will be momentous in national economic and political decision-making given evolving economic interdependence, and the rise of new social movements and ideologies. This will, in turn, change the way in which relationships between different groups, whose ethnic, religious and linguistic boundaries -sometimes cutting across political borders- are perceived and managed. The decentering of knowledge and identity in current processes also now allow us to reconceptualize such relationships as a more general field in which the speaker in power creates the map of boundaries and borders that organize people. In this new field, as Alain Touraine has put it, political democracy and cultural diversity combine on the basis of the liberty of the subject.
Conviviability could designate such a field. It would refer to the need to redefine the codes and attitudes through which human beings with different ideals of the good life are able to live together compatibly to ensure sustainable development. It would provide the guiding principle for the social and cultural transition that must be made in this global age. And it could also provide a performance marker for both the State and civil society.
Political systems or civil society?
In this setting, the discussion of the role of civil society becomes central. Many authors rightly single out the activation of civil society as the alternative to the inadequacy of many political systems which are disassembling or de-legitimizing, not only in some developing regions but in some industrialized countries as well. The question put forth by Van Thijn is very relevant: in this context do we reinforce political organisation or civil society? Leeming broadened this question in asking how can societal processes be channeled as the nation-state transforms itself.
Such a tranformation, as Kakonen argues, implies a transfer of power from the political system to civil society. It is rarely mentioned, though, that the legitimacy of that power in the hands of the State comes also from the fact it was created to keep civil peace, that is, to prevent wars between opposing factions, be they political parties, capital and labour, ethnic groups, religious sects or local communities from coming to grievious conflict. In many cases, though and increasingly, it seems governments are unable to fulfill this function. Tragically, in many places they have even fuelled conflict by taking sides against particular ethnic groups as in Bosnia, Kosovo and Rwanda.
Power being transferred to civil society, then, must be used legitimately in the same way, that is, to propitiate greater conviviability rather than less by excluding other groups. This is problematic, especially in the case of cultural minorities and autochtonous groups that demand special treatment in the context of the nation-state. One possible solution, put forth by Martin Albrow in his book on The Global Age is that the State now be thought of as separate from its nations. In this case the next move is to discuss how civil society and cultural groups will relate to each other while still living together in the framework of a State.
I use the term cultural groups rather than minorities, ethnic groups or autochtonous groups to highlight the fact that such groups are redefining their cultural identity in opposition to the State and to other social groups included in that State. Great confusion has been generated in the last few years by the implicit assumption taken by many writers that the revitalization of cultural identities is a reawakening of pristine cultural forms which had remained dormant in the 20th century nation-states and which take up their old autarchical form. This is not the case. Most often, it is the building anew, with the remembered elements of traditional cultures, of an identity recomposed to mark out their stakes in the social and political territories that are opening up as nation-states are transformed in the context of globality.
In opening up the State from within, Blair asks a most pertinent question: how far do we go? And the answer must be: only as far as a stable, consensual State can continue to function. Without it, and there are some that see this as the inevitable outcome, States will break down into a myriad micro-states. Are such micro-states financially and administratively viable? Will they be politically relevant in a Global Age? Would it be possible to manage such a proliferation of states within a United Nations, or other World Organization framework?
This poses the need for new governance structures as emphasized by the World Commission on Governance. A new kind of political conviviability is necessary, with special attention to the new forces, local and global that are arising everywhere. Movements based on environmentalism, human rights, women’s mobilizations, indigenous claims, are pressing their demands and many governments are attempting to incorporate such demands into their programs. However, in the long run, it is no longer a question of forcing new movements into the old molds of centralized, patriarchal, monocultural States but of changing the old molds. Civil society is the place where such new molds for conviviability must be developed.
New issues for civil society
If we take conviviability as a guiding principle to think about the role of civil society, then discussion must be broadened to analyze people’s concerted actions in several other settings:
Firstly, the relationship of civil society to the market. Frequently, the individuation implied in the expansion of the market which gives individuals the possibilility of becoming consumers, is linked to the development of civil society as a network of free individuals. The paradox here, as has been pointed out, is that the more democracy frees the individual to allow him/her choice, the more it undermines communal or consensual values and codes which form the social capital that is needed for development.
In second place, civil societies are rapidly evolving transborder connections in response to globality. The latter creates the need for reallignment in local communities which are now permanently linked to the outside through telecommunications, telematics, migration and tourism. Is civil society the place where the local can be at last conceived as making up the global? Is a global civil society possible in terms of in an Earth-world, -now that we have seen the photograph of this blue planet from space, and that our perception in watching the Mars landscape up close has simply made us aware that we live on this planet-?
Finally, the "longest revolution" as the women’s movement has been called, must also be part of the rethinking of civil society. Today, so many of the leaders and activists in civil society are women: from urban renewal groups, associations working with the poor, the disabled, underpriviledged children. In many places they are also the basic membership of political parties. Yet they are realizing that they will not alleviate many of the pressing problems, urban and family violence, unemployment, exclusion, isolation, unless governance structures and the social and ethnic boundaries tied to them are transformed. As more and more women participate in politics -as well as in private or international organizations- we realise that simply by incorporating our own way of managing people and programs into institutions, old ways of doing things are replaced by new patterns of behaviour. If this change becomes self-reflexive through awareness and cooperation, then whole institutions begin to change. Thus, for women, it becomes not only a question of being there but of helping rethink and rebuild institutions.
Shaping the flow
There seems to be general agreement that civil society cannot only be taken as that-which-is-not-government. It must be freed from this binary opposition to become civil society as an extension of the field of issues of public interest which overflow the narrow definition of government and politics as it is handled -and monopolised in many instances- by only a few groups of society in most countries today. As such, civil society is the space where most of the social and cultural experimentation will be held from which the new ideas, codes, institutions and attitudes of this new Global Age will come.
But it is not only a greater diversity of actors on the political stage that are needed but a rethinking of what politics are made of in a global age in which political legitimacy keeps being decentred yet the power of money and the media may recentralize it in different hands.
Civil society is also the breeding ground for all the new generations which have a broader view of the multiplicity of cultural issues that must be handled in this new era, both at the local, the national and the global level. In the open spaces provided by civil society cultural behaviour can be learned and created. If only for this, civil society associations everywhere must be strongly supported.
This is not to idealize them. Participants in civil society, being human, are prone to all the same inefficiencies, difficulties and deviations that others face in government, without the strong deterrents of legal and juridical structures. So criticism, evaluation and monitoring must be constant, in order to redirect programs and people when necessary. But, importantly, it must be done within the groups themselves, or by groups between themselves.
This brings to the fore the very important role that ethics will have in the years to come. We need many philosophical discussions to arrive at consensual goals which must come out of practice in unprecedented situations. It must be a global ethics, as the World Commission on Culture and Development has proposed, but must be evolved through our creative diversity.
Let us think of the image of our societies trying to swim in a river which has overflowed its dam; the flow seems chaotic, yet it is searching for the meanders and outlets which will give it shape; in time, given the freedom to flow while at the same time carefully monitoring that positive outlets are found, I believe this river will self-organize, as it has always done, in our history.